
many benefits they can provide.
Many of us who care about birds hang up bird feeders and plant berry-
bearing shrubs in our gardens to help them survive through the winter.
But that only helps some birds some of the time. Baby birds need to be
fed on insects or other sources of animal protein. Peanuts just will not do.
But there is deep rooted prejudice against insects. If they exist in your
garden or on your farmland, the expectation is that you will kill them, no
matter how harmless or useful they are. Strangely, people seem to make
an exception for those they find beautiful, like butterflies – but not their
caterpillars!
In my front garden is an old, lovely viburnum
which is smothered in white blossom every
year. This is followed by an outbreak of the
viburnum beetle which totally defoliates the
whole plant. These in turn are followed by
flocks of beautiful little long-tailed tits that flit
among the branches, feasting on the beetle
larvae. The viburnum thrives, the beetles
thrive, and the long-tailed tits thrive.
And it is not just insects - slugs and snails suffer unfairly too. Personally,
I never use slug pellets and as a consequence song thrushes visit
regularly, using the garden path as an anvil. The garden is full of flowers
(and bees) but they are all tough enough to thrive alongside the slugs and
snails – as they do and always have done in the natural world. It makes
life a lot easier (with the thrush’s lovely song thrown in as an extra).
There is also prejudice against dung. It has to be cleaned up and tidied
away so that we are not offended by it. Anti-social dog owners who leave
their dog’s waste in the middle of a public footpath or on a children’s play
area rightly should be fined and publicly shamed. But I feel a particular
animosity towards those idiots who put their pooch’s poo in pretty pink
polka dot bags and then abandon it. They may think the packaging
makes it better. It doesn’t. It makes it much worse. Somebody has to
remove it. They are making it somebody else’s problem.
As a pathway warden, it often becomes my problem. More and more of
these little bags build up – offensive to look at, and offensive to smell,
especially in hot weather. And, most importantly, they never go away. A
naked, not plastic-wrapped, dog turd will quickly decompose and
disappear. Plastic lasts for a very, very long time.